Keeping its promise to back tech startups in India, retail giant Walmart’s digital arm Walmart Labs has made another acquihire in the country. The US-based firm’s seven-year-old lab in Bengaluru has taken over a local startup called Dataturks.
Following the deal, the five-member team of Dataturks will be part of merchant technology team for catalogue enrichment. In a nutshell, Walmart will leverage Dataturk’s machine learning capabilities for content enhancement.
An Entrackr‘s query to Dataturks and its co-founder & CEO Mohan Gupta and Walmart Labs pertaining to the deal did not elicit an immediate response. We will update the post as the responses come in.
Led by former Flipsters (referred to as Flipkart’s employees) Gupta and Gajendra Dadheech, Dataturks essentially provide image bounding, document & text annotation, leveraging NLP.
The startup was selected among 19 startups for Axilor Ventures’ Summer Cohort 2018. It has partnered with over 1,000 companies from all over the world and got recognition as an FBStart company and Y Combinator Track 2017.
This the third acquihire deal within six months for Walmart Labs. Last September, it absorbed Appsfly and Int.Ai’s teams to ramp up its technology team in India.
Besides acquiring 76 per cent of Flipkart and orchestrating numerous acuihires, Walmart is reportedly set to hire 1,000 people in the county this year.
According to Hari Vasudev, country head, Walmart Labs India, the company is expanding tech teams, including data science, product management, and design aspects.
He also added that the share of Indian workforce in overall technology will be close to 50 per cent in the next three to four years.
Source: CNBC TV18
